Monday, September 28, 2009

“We’re so out of here”

'This week, John F. Burns, The Times’s chief foreign correspondent, will be taking questions on the end of the American war in Iraq.

In February, the newly inaugurated President Obama announced that all combat troops would be withdrawn by August 2010, seven and a half years after the war began, and the remaining troops by 2011.

But with relative calm in Iraq and instability expanding quickly in Afghanistan, Americans and their leaders increasingly see Iraq as the war already fought. “We’re so out of here,” a Marine officer said in July in Anbar province, once the heart of the insurgency there.

Does America seem intent on leaving Iraq, no matter what happens? Should we? Would a return to wide-scale sectarian violence, or the opening of a new front between Kurds and Arabs, obligate U.S. soldiers to stay? What was accomplished and what was left undone?'

Baghdad in 2000: "A woman known as Um Haydar was beheaded reportedly without charge or trial at the end of December 2000. She was 25 years' old and married with three children. Her husband was sought by the security authorities reportedly because of his involvement in Islamist armed activities against the state. He managed to flee the country. Men belonging to Feda'iyye Saddam came to the house in al-Karrada district and found his wife, children and his mother. Um Haydar was taken to the street and two men held her by the arms and a third pulled her head from behind and beheaded her in front of the residents. The beheading was also witnessed by members of the Ba'ath Party in the area. The security men took the body and the head in a plastic bag, and took away the children and the mother-in-law. The body of Um Haydar was later buried in al-Najaf. The fate of the children and the mother-in-law remains unknown."